Ayelet Waldman talks Hobgoblin and More

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Last week, an article in Variety announced that HBO had signed on Darren Aronofsky – lauded director of five feature films, including Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Requiem for a Dream – to direct “Hobgoblin,” a new drama pilot in development. The pilot will be written by husband-and-wife team Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, who will also executive produce, along with John Lesher and Adam Kassan.

The Millions: The subject matter for Hobgoblin – i.e. the role of magicians in deceiving Hitler during World War II – is fascinating, and very particular. Where did the idea for the series originate?

Ayelet Waldman: Michael and I had decided we wanted to write a contemporary series, set locally so that we wouldn’t have to travel, so that everyone could just roll out of bed and go to work. So, of course, as soon as we limited our imaginations to California in 2011, we came up with Britain in 1941.

TM: Is there a lot of research involved in writing the pilot, or had you and your husband Michael Chabon already been engaged in the subject matter?

AW: Tons. And that’s the best part. We’ve been reading everything we can get our hands on about the period, we’ve been watching old movies (which is tremendous fun). I was pretty well immersed in the period already — I am writing a novel set, in part, in Salzburg in 1945 — and Michael spent five years of his life sleeping, breathing, dreaming the Golden Age of comic books, and wrote a novella about war time Britain (Final Solution, read it) so the time period is a comfortable one for us.

TM: Is Jasper Maskelyne and his Magic Gang the inspiration, and will they appear as characters? (There’s buzz on the Internet about this, inquiring minds apparently want to know!)

AW: Details are officially under wraps. I can and will tell you this — we have made up all the characters in the story. None are based on anyone who actually existed.

TM: Your husband has been involved in several film projects, and you have also had a novel adapted into a film; but this is the first TV project for both of you?

AW: We’ve both been happily employed in the health insurance scam that is pilot season before (write a pilot, get a year of health insurance from the writer’s guild). Neither of us has been lucky enough to have any of our pilots produced yet.

TM: How, so far, has the process of writing a TV pilot been different from writing a film screenplay? Or a novel?

AW: It’s a delightful combination of screenwriting and novel writing. A teleplay is, of course, very much like a screenplay, but because there exists at least the potential of a series, you are allowed to set plot and character elements in motion that can take a long time to play out and pay off. This is far more similar to the process of plotting a novel.

TM: You mentioned in another interview that you and your husband are very supportive of each other’s work, but what is it like collaborating this closely on a writing project? How have you found that your interests/strengths complement (or clash)?

AW: Our interests are very complementary, though they are of course also very different. In this instance, we both love the world of cons and con men, of Vaudeville. We’re infatuated by the romance of wartime Britain’s Keep Calm and Carry On ethos. Magic is more Michael’s purview.

We clash, of course. Constantly. It wouldn’t be fun if we didn’t. We are one another’s biggest fans and harshest critics. I don’t know if members of other writing teams make vomiting sounds when they don’t like a partner’s suggestion. (In fairness, only I do this. Michael is much more likely to bark a gruff, “No.”)

TM: How did the collaboration with Darren Aronofsky come about?

AW: Luck. We both love Mr. Aronofsky’s work, but it’s the producer of the project, the multi-talented John Lesher, who gets credit for convincing him to come on board.

TM: As Executive Producers, have you envisioned in detail the entire series beyond the pilot? If so, how many episodes?

The series takes place during World War II and begins in 1941. You do the math. How many episodes? 529. We plan to beat “The Simpsons.”

(Right now, we are only just writing the pilot. We are a million miles away from going to series.)

TM: You’ve had a career as a public defender, you’ve written a mystery series, three novels, a best-selling memoir, and many personal essays; you’re co-editing an anthology of writing by women in prison; you’re a mother of four and a wife. Now, a TV series. Did you always know that you had this many talents; or has it been more like a discovery process, each thing leading to the next?

AW: Talents? Bah. I’m just indecisive.

TM: Your most recent novel, Red Hook Road, features three compelling elements: love, tragedy, and social class. It also features a young girl who is a violinist. Pat Conroy wrote: “With language and example, Ayelet teaches me everything I didn’t know and can never know about music.” Are you also a musician, or are you just brilliantly channeling research?

AW: Before I began the novel I knew nothing about music. I mean, seriously, nothing. It’s all about the research. Research is by far my favorite part of writing.

TM: Related to this, is Red Hook Road further from your personal experience than your first two novels?

AW: Absolutely. It is set in a place I love (Maine) but the characters and story are very very far from my life. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, which, when you think about it, is pretty telling. Perhaps we should all be grateful that I’m writing a TV pilot about magicians and con men who spy for the British in World War II.

Sonya Chung
is author of the novels Long for This World (Scribner 2010) and The Loved Ones (Relegation Books 2016), which was a selection for Kirkus Best Fiction 2016, Indie Next List, Library Journal Best Indie Fiction, TNB Book Club, Buzzfeed Books Recommends, and Writer's Bone Best 30 Books 2016. She is founding editor of Bloom and teaches fiction writing at Skidmore College. Learn more about Sonya here.

Future Missionaries of America by Matthew Vollmer and Floodmarkers by Nic Brown are short story collections from debut writers with enormous gifts. Their work is beautiful, funny, and delightfully weird. Matthew and Nic were my classmates at Iowa, where they proved to be not only talented writers, but also sharp and passionate readers. Since they’re pals, I thought it would be fun if Matthew and Nic interviewed each other about their books. It’s a real thrill for me to see their stories in print, and to have them on The Millions.In this second installment, Nic interviews Matthew about Future Missionaries of America. Of the book, the New York Times Book Review said, “Vollmer writes with equal dexterity about teenagers and adults, men and women, atheists and believers, Goths and jocks, dropouts and doctors – less interested in getting down any particular demographic, it would seem, than in revealing the humans beneath. Expertly structured and utterly convincing, these stories represent the arrival of a strong new voice.” In part one, Matthew interviewed Nic.Nic Brown: In your book, you write several amazing, matter-of-fact, contemporary, and complicated stories involving aspects of Christianity – namely Seventh Day Adventists. I know you have some family background with this religion. Did you feel uncomfortable at any point writing about people of this faith (and those only encountering it, like the protagonist of the book’s title story), or worried about how any Seventh Day Adventists you know would react? How have they reacted?Matthew Vollmer: Yes, it’s true I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. People may find it hard to believe that stopping each week for 24 hours (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) to rest, reflect, and abstain from “secular” activities (TV watching, sports, shopping, school, work, reading Mad magazine, etc.) could be great, but by and large being an SDA kid was pretty great, at least in my family. Sure, my church and grade school (and boarding academy) had some kooks, but as you pointed out in your interview, we’re all freaks and there are kooks everywhere. When you grow up SDA, you grow up in a very tight knit group of people, the majority of whom like to have fun, even if they don’t, by and large, dance or participate in competitive sports or listen to rock n roll or endorse the consumption of alcohol, drugs, tobacco, or “flesh foods.” I suppose my problem began to emerge in college, once I started to ask questions about the “27 Fundamental Beliefs.” Also, I started to meet people who weren’t SDA. I started to appreciate different cultures, different cultural experiences, and eventually, I just found the SDA culture much too inhibitive, too insular. From my perspective, the SDA church was one that wanted to provide answers for why everything is the way it is. And those answers were often unsatisfying. Not to mention I surrendered the idea of having to have an answer for everything. I realized that sometimes, it’s okay for things to remain mysterious.For years I’d tried to write about the SDA experience. But usually, when I did, I aimed at the easiest possible targets, like hypocritical characters, or characters who cherish some secret sin or something; I wrote one really terrible story about a church Treasurer, who had a crush on a teenage boy operating a soft serve yogurt machine. But those stories didn’t work as well; they seemed forced – as artificial and agenda-ridden as the bedtime stories I listened to as a kid, where “little Sammy never disobeyed his mommy and daddy again!” It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the idea of writing about outsiders who experience SDA culture that I found I could really capture both the strangeness and earnestness of SDAs, and use representations of that culture as fuel for the story. Also, I could harness the energies of my own desire (and failure) to fully understand this peculiar group of people, while portraying them as real people with real struggles. Hopefully, despite the fact that SDAs might seem strange, I hope people will see them in a favorable light.As for SDA reactions: I only know what people in my family have said (though I predict that plenty would be scandalized by the book). My father, who is one of my biggest supporters, has, as of this writing, still not read the book – but that’s not saying a lot: he’s more of a Suduku player and internet news reader. My mom read most of the stories beforehand, I think, and will usually offer some sort of vague praise, like, “I just don’t know how you do it,” or, “How do you think this stuff up?!” Which is sort of how my grandmother reacted. Imagine the nicest and sweetest person on the planet, a woman who has never said anything bad about anybody (and who always, always counteracts criticism of someone else with something positive), and who, when she sees a sex scene in a movie, says, “Aw… I was hoping they weren’t going to be naughty!” And then imagine her reading a story collection by her grandson that’s filled with foul language, sex scenes, violence, and all sorts of pathological behaviors. You know what she said? “It’s not exactly my cup of tea, but what an amazing imagination you have!”Finally (I know this is a long response, but you ask me about this SDA stuff and it really gets me going), my Uncle Don, whom I adore, and who played in a folk band in the 60s (and recently revived that band) that was the equivalent of the Grateful Dead for SDAs, asked me if he’d be able to use my book for devotionals with his church members. It was a joke, of course, and we both laughed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that. Like, why couldn’t he use the book for devotionals? It was and is a book about people trying to figure out life and how to live it. So I wrote him and told him what I thought and lo and behold, he not only agreed, but said he’d felt bad about making that joke.NB: You have some amazing settings: a national park, a laboratory researching hemophiliac dogs, an exhibition of preserved and dissected human bodies, and a religious boarding school, to name just a few. Can you talk about your inspiration for these?MV: Evoking setting and using it to generate various effects in stories is one of my favorite things to do. I don’t travel that much, but (thanks in part to friends & relatives who’ve been spread over the globe, some as missionaries) I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of the world. Every setting in the book, I think, is a setting that I’ve visited in “real life.” I worked at Yellowstone. I worked at a laboratory researching hemophiliac dogs & pigs. I worked as a field technician in Purdue’s entomology department. I lived in Chapel Hill. I visited Idaho, Atlanta, Carolina Beach. And I attended a religious boarding school in north Georgia. All these settings offered up (at some point) ideas for characters and stories about those characters. Some characters are based on people I encountered in these places (like Mark Scheider, for instance). Others, like the widow in “Second Home,” I came up with on my own. That particular story suggested itself during a visit with my parents and aunt and uncle to a cabin on Lake Sunnapee in New Hampshire. To avoid the older folks, I took a walk through the woods to another lake house, looked around, saw nobody was home, opened the door, and walked inside. I guess that was probably illegal, but I’m glad I did it. I stole a story from that house.NB: And – is there such a thing as a robotic human baby that records your interactions with it, as depicted in Future Missionaries of America? Or did you come up with this?MV: I get this question a lot. I WISH I’d come up with it. Maybe I should start saying that I did. At any rate, it’s all real. I asked for information and the company said, “Are you an educator?” and I said yes so they sent me this brochure (which featured a cutaway diagram of one of the babies, which turned out to be really helpful) and a DVD (which I’ve since lost) that talked about how educators could use the babies in the classroom. It was awesome.NB: Stylistically, your stories are all over the place. You have a footnoted will (in “Will & Testament”), a transcript of an answering machine message (“Man-O’-War”), a few first person narrators, a few third person. Some are more prose-driven (“Oh Land of National Paradise, How Glorious are thy Bounties”), and some defy reality (like my favorite, “Stewards of the Earth”). Did these stories arise from formal experimentation, or did the narrative ideas warrant the differing storytelling techniques?MV: I’d ascribe the stylistic variations to several different factors. The first is that the stories in the collection came into being over the course of ten years. During that time, I played around with a lot of different styles and voices and narrative forms, and every year, the story manuscript evolved significantly. For a while, maybe during 02-03, I was really interested in the various forms a story could take and thought that it might be cool to publish a collection of stories in different sub-genres, since, in addition to the will and testament story, I had a story that took the form of the last entry in a hipster’s blog, a letter from a deranged and estranged father to his son, and a story called “The Ghost of Bob Ross Paints Shit Town,” which took the form of a transcript of one of Bob Ross’ “The Joy of Painting” shows, only in this one, Bob Ross was dead and painting the neighborhood where I lived at the time, which included such characters a shirtless midget who liked to sit on the roof of his duplex, a boy with a rat tail, and a bearded man riding a moped with a parrot on his shoulder. Also, “The Gospel of Mark Schneider” was originally formatted like a series of chapters from the Bible, with a giant number at the beginning of each section and a number before each sentence (or verse). (At the time, however, VQR couldn’t figure out how to translate that into whatever software they were using at the time, so I agreed to lose the formatting altogether, which was probably a good thing.)Basically, I get an idea for a story and hope the voice can generate enough energy to sustain the narrative.NB: In the story “Straightedge,” a secondary character says that her father, “one of Marlon Brando’s personal chefs, had acquired psychic powers after surviving an auto accident, and on the eve on the first moon walk, he’d dreamed of her mother… who he met the next day.” I guess my question is: what? Did this actually come out of your brain?MV: Ha! Yes!NB: What are you working on now?MV: I’m about four-fifths of the way through a first draft of a novel about young woman who has to postpone her dreams of being a collegiate basketball star because she gets knocked up by a soldier during a furlough. The young woman goes to work at a dental office as a receptionist, has the baby. The baby’s father comes back, but he’s changed – he eats all the time, chews tobacco, drinks constantly (though he claims he can’t get drunk), doesn’t sleep, and is obsessed with playing a disturbingly realistic online computer game called Operation Brutal Humiliation. By chance, the young woman meets another man named Donnie Trueblood, a whitewater rafting guide who claims to be a shaman and who informs her that she’s lost her power animal. The rest of the novel documents the young woman’s quest to retrieve this power animal and restore the man she fell in love with. Along the way there’s an overweight 12-year-old magician, a loudmouthed woman who extols the virtues of Christian sex toys, a six foot six barber with a goiter the size of a grapefruit in his neck, and a grandfather dressed up as a vampire.NB: Who do you like most: Desi Arnez, the Fonz, Magnum PI, McGiver, or John Locke from the TV show “Lost”?MV: McGiver? Do you mean MacGyver? McGiver! Sounds like some crazy new promotion at McDonald’s. Anyway, no question. Magnum rules.Read part one in which Matthew interviews Nic.

When I first encountered the work of Péter Esterházy, at the 2008 PEN World Voices festival, all I knew of him was his name. But what a name! The House of Esterházy, like an Eastern European amalgam of the Medicis and the Kennedys, was prominent in Austro-Hungarian culture and politics for centuries, until the upheavals of the 20th Century cost the family almost everything. It’s a cost Esterházy assesses in his magnum opus, Harmonia Caelestis (2000), from which he read that night, in his native tongue. “I don’t speak English,” he said. “You don’t speak Hungarian. This is the problem.” Nonetheless, he sent his audience rushing to the merch tables, where his books promptly sold out.

Esterházy has long loomed large in Europe, having annealed its literary-historical legacy in the crucible of his own idiosyncratic, comic, and humane voice. Among his major novels are Helping Verbs of the Heart and A Little Hungarian Pornography, both available in English, and Production Novel and the enormous Introduction to Literature, both not. This body of work earned Esterházy the distinguished Peace Prize of the German Book Fair in 2004 – the year Harmonia Caelestis appeared in English, as Celestial Harmonies. “A writer whose voice is heard far and wide,” ran the citation. “The youngest of the ‘Joyceans’ didn’t just place his homeland in the center of Europe, he also placed Europe in the middle of literature.”

I finally laid hands on Celestial Harmonies last year and finished it this winter – just in time for Esterházy’s appearance at the 92nd Street Y, in support of the just-released Not Art. Through the good graces of 92Y and Ecco Press, Esterházy agreed to a wide-ranging interview via email, with his stalwart translator Judith Sollosy acting as our intermediary. For those just discovering Esterházy, Ecco has furnished an excerpt of Not Art you can read here.

The Millions: Your acrobatic sentences may remind contemporary American readers of Donald Barthelme, or even of Diane Williams, but I’m guessing that when you turned to novel-writing during the Kádár era, such linguistic self-consciousness was sui generis. Can you tell us a bit about how your style developed, and how it fit into the social, political, and aesthetic climate of Budapest in the ’70s?

Péter Esterházy: My admittedly conscious use of language, I think, was not conscious. It was my hand or my stomach that knew. In short, I didn’t approach writing from the vantage point of theory, but from the side of practice – much like a stonemason. A stonemason is brick-centered, too. At the time this was considered marginal, but at the time marginality seemed the natural state of being. The center is suspect. Everything that is official is suspect. Except, in essence, it’s basically the official that exists. This is what we call a dictatorship.

TM: Did you feel yourself to be part of a broader movement of younger writers or artists, or did you have a sense of doing something quite radical? And how did your academic training as a mathematician inform your approach to fiction?

PE: I think that as far as my reflexes are concerned I would have liked to have been a so-called l’art pour l’art writer. But in a dictatorship everything takes on political coloring, and though a writer may declare, or rather practice, that a text is a text is a text (and a rose), still all this ends up in a pronounced moral sphere, it takes on social function; in fact, whether the writer intends it or not, that’s the role it plays. But that’s all right. It is what happened to my books as well.

At first I noticed similar aspirations among contemporary poets (Dezső Tandori, Imre Oravecz). Clearly, the same thing comes off as a sort of radicalism in prose. But my temperament is less radical than it is consistent. I may have brought this with me from mathematics. You can’t divide by zero if you’d like to win over lots of readers, or if it would seem beneficial for the nation. It is language that is radical, and I accommodated myself to it instinctively. I could tell that it was creating me [and not the other way around]. Whereas at the time I hadn’t read Wittgenstein. But no, I take that back. I read him for my Logic in Mathematics class.

TM: And yet, even as you interrogate language in a decidedly postmodern manner, you’re deeply engaged with the earlier tradition of the bourgeois novel – as if you were, like Nurse Emma in Not Art, “the land of avid readers all rolled into one.” I’m curious about your habits and history as a reader: how you came to these works, what they meant for you, and how your reading practice and your writing practice interact.

PE: For a long time I didn’t read contemporary authors, but I did read a lot of classical literature, all the Hungarians – Kosztolányi, Móricz, Mikszáth – the great French, the great Russians, the great English writers. When I read something, I didn’t think of it as a chore. I always read for my own amusement, my own pleasure. The way I drink wine. And whiskey. And grappa… The way I eat.

When I was thirtysomethingish there came a time when I realized that I was reading almost exclusively as work. I immediately made it a rule to read fifteen minutes of poetry every morning. I go to my room in the morning and read poetry.

TM: The first part of Celestial Harmonies, in particular, is like a conversation with Joyce, Nabokov, Thomas Mann, and Lampedusa, among others.

PE: I read Joyce the way I read Balzac. But Joyce was important because – though it sounds like the arrogance of a young man – I saw that I wasn’t alone. That’s why the Austrian avant-garde was also important [to me] at the time. For example, Handke. Or the modern classical authors, mostly the Austrians rather than the Germans, Musil rather than Thomas Mann, Broch rather than Hesse. Still, I had great, orgiastic experiences reading Mann into the wee hours of the morning. That goes without saying. I didn’t know what I was doing, where I was headed (I still don’t, nor do I mind), and I needed some affirmation. I later happened upon a good anthology of American postmodern writers. (Naturally, the title was Entropy.) Pynchon, Barthelme, Sukenick, Barth. The Eastern European postmodern is always more charged with history. When I use June 16th as a motif, it is Bloomsday and also June 16, 1958, the day that Imre Nagy, the leader of the Hungarian revolution, was hanged.

TM: I was intrigued, in light of these references, to learn from the end matter of Celestial Harmonies that you also leaned on Frank McCourt. Are you a fan? What in Angela’s Ashes appealed to you?

PE: I’m not a great fan. But then, I come to someone’s writing not out of admiration but out of necessity. McCourt knows so much about poverty, and the face of Irish poverty is a little different from Hungarian poverty. When I rewrote some passages, it was this richness and strangeness that was important for me. If I had a streak of envy in me (which I don’t, I’d say modestly), I’d say that I envy those for whom the act of writing is so obviously not a problem.

TM: In the second half of Celestial Harmonies, the allusive symphony of the first part gives way to something more nakedly personal. American reviewers seemed to prefer the latter, but in my mind the two constitute a unity, like the stool and wheel that comprise Duchamp‘s “Bicycle Wheel.”

PE: I also hope that the two together make up a unit. At least, it would be good if this were true. I think that if the Good Lord or Goethe had written this novel, it certainly wouldn’t be in two parts.

TM: How did you arrive at this conception for the novel’s structure? Why is each part necessary to the other?

PE: Let me try [to say it] briefly: As I got more and more immersed in my family’s history, I realized that there were a great many stories, practically infinite, which also meant that the family was wealthy, very wealthy. But I couldn’t find a natural linear way of presenting this, not to mention the fact that it was not the relating of the family history as faithfully as possible that motivated me but the other way around; I wanted to say something universal through the family history. In short, there was this heap of stories. Then I attempted to sort them thematically, daytime stories, nighttime stories, where someone is kissed, where it’s raining. But then what am I to do with the story where someone is kissed in the rain who immediately died as a result? In short, I couldn’t come up with a viable choreography, I couldn’t put the stories in order, because this order didn’t exist inside me. So I was left with the numbering.

TM: Is there some specific effect you imagined the two halves having together?

PE: With the numbered stories I managed some sort of historical perspective. By making “my father” the main character of these stories, meaning that I turned everyone into my father, I basically destroyed the taboo of fatherhood. And so it seemed apt that once we’d come to accept this fatherless world, I should relate a Twentieth Century father-story which is very much like my own father’s story.

The relationship of the two parts to reality is different (just as Revised Edition is different, too). Anyway, it’s something like this. Heine was supposed to have said that bad writers write whatever they hear, we good writers write whatever we can, and Herr Goethe writes whatever he wants.

TM: You’ve mentioned Revised Edition – a kind of third part of Celestial Harmonies that appeared 2004. The climax of the earlier novel, in certain ways, is your late father’s arrest – or maybe I should say the character Mátyás Esterházy’s arrest – amid the crackdown of 1956. In Celestial Harmonies, as in “reality,” your father is released and settles into the quiet life of a translator. However, as you learned after the novel’s publication, he also became an informer for the secret police. It’s this discovery you recount in Revised Edition, which (unconscionably) has not been published in English…

PE: Its non-appearance in English I regret, just like you.

TM: For an American, it’s tempting to read this discovery in black-and-white terms – the hero turns bad guy – but most of us have little conception of how the police state works. Or anyway, I don’t. What understanding of your father’s actions did you arrive at while writing Revised Edition? Do you still see him, as he was in Celestial Harmonies, as representative of his time and place? And what kind of information did he provide to the authorities? Have you made your peace with that?

PE: I even grumble when they say that in Celestial Harmonies I erected a memorial or whatnot to my father. But there’s no doubt that I’m to blame for this popular misconception. Also, if we look at the novels and plays in world literature where there is a father, the father in my novel resembles my real father the most. To me, this complicated answer is important, and judging by your first question, I know that you know this. I use my life as raw material for my novels. If I didn’t have a father, I couldn’t have written Celestial Harmonies this way.

I know, of course, that this is not what your question is about, and I don’t wish to digress. My father’s life is an example of how Eastern European history can crush people, their lives and fate, like a steamroller. In a dictatorship, weakness brings its own immediate reprisal. I think that an American can have little idea about dictatorship. (I know that this may sound rather conceited, as if we know something here, or know it better. I do not think this.) A totalitarian dictatorship – and at the time this is what it was – essentially puts an end to society, and the individual is completely at the mercy of the powers that be. This is an entirely different dimension than America in the fifties, the McCarthy era, let’s say.

Paradoxically, for others my father, while he lived, embodied the independence and generosity of spirit that we discover in the hero of Celestial Harmonies. But when he looked in the mirror in the morning, he saw only an informer. And the day began, and he went about his duties as the father of four children, he went to work, seemed cheerful, etc., without any moral backing – there wasn’t any, because he’d destroyed it himself. In the book I could achieve, sentence after sentence, a balance between the personal memories and love and the recently learned facts, but I can’t do it any more. Now I see only my father’s great loneliness (he died eleven years ago), and all the things for which I am grateful to him. In short, my memories are at work, not my knowledge. (Which also means that I could never reconcile the two properly, because I didn’t understand the whole thing, not really.) But I have no wish to play down what happened to him and because of him. If someone who finds himself in my father’s position swears that he never harmed anyone, he is either mistaken or is telling a lie. It is not possible not to cause harm. That’s the problem.

I read through the reports – the ones they gave me, anyway – from 1958 to 1980, and you can see him slipping into the bottomless pit, the filth, the way he initially puts up a fight, sabotaging, then he tries keeping only to form, at which he often succeeds, though not always. If I didn’t mind the risk of being misunderstood, I’d say that I’ve read lots of reports, I saw German Stasi reports, and my father’s is that of an amateur, meaning that he was not spiteful just to be spiteful. But it makes almost no difference. It would be a mistake to use it as an excuse. Not that I want to make excuses. I know many wonderful things and many ugly things about my father….

My father now appears to me like the world: it’s a pretty bad place, but it is very good, it is magical to be alive.

TM: Your most recently translated book, Not Art, concerns “my mother,” who was not an incidental figure in your previous work. Are the challenges of writing about a mother distinct from those of writing about a father, or are they more or less the same?

PE: To me, everything is merely (“merely!”) a linguistic problem. I can mobilize lots of emotion with the words “father” and “mother.” But my approach is not psychological in nature, and so I see no difference. Or else I deny it, even to myself!

TM: Broadly, it seems, your writing has traced a trajectory from romantic love to filial love…

PE: Not so much with Revised Edition as with Celestial Harmonies, something came to an end, I finished writing something to the end, I walked all through the garden. I must now put the camera someplace else…. For instance, if I write about the family, I will not be looking and writing from the inside, because I’ve already provided the inside view. For me, Not Art already indicates a slight shift, there’s a father and a mother, but their fictional nature has gained weight. It’s my autobiography that I consider fiction. On the other hand, all this is just intellectual sleight-of-hand; practice paves the way. (The way that does not exist, and which comes into being because I walk towards it.)

TM: Finally (just for the hell of it): as a committed and enthusiastic appropriator of texts, do you have any thoughts about the case of Helene Hegemann, the Leipzig Book Fair prize nominee who’s been painted in some quarters as a plagiarist?

PE: I haven’t read her book, and whether what she’s done is all right or not can only be answered in concrete terms. These are not easy questions, and the Internet has changed the situation. Friends teaching at the university tell me how prevalent cut and paste jobs have become, the control-c, control-v “culture”. I wouldn’t dream of supporting this lack of culture. But it wouldn’t be a good idea to leave the regulation of such matters to the law either. It would limit freedom needlessly. At the same time, other people’s work should be honored, including the authors of blogs. We need to find a way of balancing these two, to find a solution. A friendly solution.

I watched Friday Night Lights in real time, as it aired. I wonder if it would have been as much of an influence if I had “binged-watched” all five seasons back-to-back in one or two months’ time. Instead, the show stretched out over the course of five years, 2006-2011, which for me were years when I had to throw out most of the fiction I wrote.